The leaders who, for many years, have been at the head of the French armies have formed a government. This government, alleging the defeat of our armies, has made contact with the enemy in order to stop the fighting. It is true, we were, we are, overwhelmed by the mechanical, ground and air forces of the enemy. Infinitely more than their number, it is the tanks, the aeroplanes, the tactics of the Germans which are causing us to retreat. It was the tanks, the aeroplanes, the tactics of the Germans that surprised our leaders to the point of bringing them to where they are today.

But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!

Believe me, I who am speaking to you with full knowledge of the facts, and who tell you that nothing is lost for France. The same means that overcame us can bring us victory one day. For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast Empire behind her. She can align with the British Empire that holds the sea and continues the fight. She can, like England, use without limit the immense industry of the United States.

This war is not limited to the unfortunate territory of our country. This war is not over as a result of the Battle of France. This war is a world war. All the mistakes, all the delays, all the suffering, do not alter the fact that there are, in the world, all the means necessary to crush our enemies one day. Vanquished today by mechanical force, in the future we will be able to overcome by a superior mechanical force. The fate of the world depends on it.

I, General de Gaulle, currently in London, invite the officers and the French soldiers who are located in British territory or who might end up here, with their weapons or without their weapons, I invite the engineers and the specialised workers of the armament industries who are located in British territory or who might end up here, to put themselves in contact with me.

Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on the radio from London.

See article on Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Appeal of 18th June‘.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

World War Two began with a single death; a death that Hitler would use as the justification for going to war and invading Poland. The victim’s name, largely forgotten to history, was Franciszek (or Franz) Honiok.

Eastward ambition

The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939 had been the penultimate piece in Hitler’s grand jigsaw. With the Soviet Union safely out of the way, Hitler was now free to pursue his ambitions.

Three days later, on 26 August, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland. Troops had begun to mobilize only for Hitler, nervous of Britain’s response, to rescind the order. He knew he couldn’t simply march in – he needed a pretext. In the event, he made one up.

On 28 August, Hitler revoked the German-Polish Non-Aggression Treaty of 1934. The Poles knew what was coming.

On the nights leading up to 31 August / 1 September, there were no less than twenty-one incidences along the German-Polish border faked by the Germans which, to a gullible world, would seem like acts of Polish aggression for which retaliation was perfectly justifiable.

Operation Himmler

These acts of farce, codenamed Operation Himmler, were organised by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. The most notorious was the Gleiwitz Incident, the faked attack on the radio transmitting station, a few miles inside Germany, near the border town of Gleiwitz in the Silesia region (pictured).

Early evening on 31 August 1939, SS soldiers, dressed up as Polish partisans and led by a notorious Nazi thug, Major Alfred Naujocks, ‘attacked’ the German transmitter and its German guards (more SS men dressed up), and broadcast in Polish a brief anti-German message.

To make the attack look more authentic, the Germans had brought along an inmate from the Dachau concentration camp, the forty-three-year-old Franciszek Honiok, a farmer and a known Polish sympathizer, arrested by the Gestapo just the day before. The unfortunate Honiok was, what the Germans called, ‘canned goods’, kept alive until the Gestapo had need for a dead but still warm body.

Having dressed Honiok as a Polish bandit, they drugged him unconscious, shot him at the scene and then left his body there as evidence of the supposed attack. Local police and press found the body and the news spread across Europe. ‘There have been reports of an attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz,’ reported the BBC. ‘Several of the Poles were reported killed, but the numbers are not yet known.’ The attack made the New York Times the following day.

Hitler knew that the falsehood of Operation Himmler was highly transparent but, as he lectured his staff the week before, ‘I need a propagandistic cause for declaring war, whether convincing or not. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth’.

4.45 a.m. World War Two starts

The following morning, 1 September, at 4.45 German troops attacked Poland. Hours later Hitler spoke to the nation, referring to the ‘Polish atrocities’. He continued, ‘This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory. This group of Polish Army hooligans has finally exhausted our patience. Since 5.45 a. m. we have been returning the fire… I will continue this struggle, no matter against whom, until the safety of the Reich and its rights are secured.’ Whether by accident or design, Hitler was an hour out. 

Rudolph Hess, getting carried away in hyperbole, declared, ‘There is bloodshed, Herr Chamberlain! There are dead! Innocent people have died. The responsibility for this, however, lives with England, which talks of peace while fanning the flames of war. England that has point blank refused all the Fuhrer’s proposals for peace throughout the years.’

Technically, Franciszek Honiok had been killed during peacetime but his death can be considered the first in a conflict that would, over the ensuing six years, claim over fifty million victims.

The Second World War had begun.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The rescue of Mussolini: on 12 September 1943, in an audacious expedition, the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was rescued from imprisonment by a group of German commandoes.

Background

The war was not going well for Italy and Mussolini. Campaigns against Greece and Albania had ended in ignoble defeat and things were going poorly for Italian forces fighting in North Africa. The Italian people were beginning to taste the bitter fruit of disillusionment with their leader.

On 20 January 1943, Mussolini had a meeting with his foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, who was also his son-in-law. Believing the war to be a lost cause, Ciano urged Mussolini to seek terms with the Allies. Mussolini flatly refused. (Indeed, Ciano had approached his British counterpart, Anthony Eden, the previous November but had no joy. Ciano had been dubious about Italy’s participation in the war from the start. When, on 10 June 1940, Mussolini declared war on France, Ciano wrote in his diary, ‘I am sad, very sad. The adventure begins. May God help Italy!’) Ciano paid for his lack of faith when, on 5 February 1943, his father-in-law sacked him from his post. Ciano took up a post within the Vatican who were also holding discussions with the Allies into the make-up of a potential non-fascist Italian government.

The end in sight

Allied troops landed on Sicily on 10 July 1943, where they enjoyed an ecstatic welcome from the islanders. By mid-August the German forces escaped the island by crossing over the narrow Strait of Messina onto the Italian mainland. Mussolini appealed to his ally, Adolf Hitler, to send reinforcements but with German forces tied up on the Eastern Front, where they had just lost the crucial Battle of Stalingrad, no help was forthcoming.

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On 28 June 2012, the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, unveiled a new memorial, the Bomber Command Memorial, to the airmen of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command who fought during the Second World War.

The Bomber Command Memorial, made of Portland Stone and situated in London’s Green Park, has, as its centrepiece, a nine-foot-high bronze sculpture of a typical seven-man crew, five of them gazing into the distance as if waiting for their comrades to return.

Many never did. 55,573 British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and other Commonwealth pilots and crewmen lost their lives and 8,403 were wounded, a sixty per cent causality rate, far higher than most other forms of armed service during the war. A further 9,838 were taken prisoners-of-war. Allied crewmen who survived being shot down in Germany, if not taken prisoner, were often lynched.

With only one in four aircrew surviving their allocated thirty missions, the attacks were eventually halted. Yet following the war, it took 67 years to officially appreciate what these men did. (The crews were even denied a campaign medal for their dangerous work.)

Designed by architect, Liam O’Connor, the Bomber Command Memorial cost almost £6 million to construct, the funding coming from public donations and private sponsors, such as Lord Ashcroft (a generous man for sure but could be accused of being overly greedy in his purchasing of so many Victoria Crosses for his own collection) and Bee Gee, Robin Gibb, who died in May 2012, but not, it has to be said, the government.

Initially, Dresden, the German city interminably linked with the destruction wrought by Bomber Command, objected to the memorial but an inscription commemorating all the lives lost during the bombing raids eased their concerns. The RAF’s last flying Lancaster Bomber flew over the proceedings releasing a shower of red poppies in a sign of remembrance for the fallen. Some 6,000 veterans and their families attended the ceremony, for whom the occasion was an emotional one.

‘The Few’

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